September 2011

A mural on a wall of the Guangxi University campus directs viewers to "Love Socialism." Photo by Tim Quijano.

While teaching at Guangxi University’s Sino-Canadian International last fall, I noticed a remarkable transition between the way the students of my class acted at the beginning of the semester and the way they carried themselves toward the end. They had transformed from stereotypically timid high school students, self-segregated by gender in their seating arrangements, into students who were much more outgoing, speaking out when I asked them to… and increasingly when I didn’t. As our relationship developed through the year, they became comfortable expressing more personal topics with me. The following relates a story that reports on the difficulty of negotiating the fine line of what is and is not acceptable in contemporary Chinese society.

At the end of class one day, a student (student A)[1] came up to me.

“Tim, do you know who Han Han is?”[2]

This was student A’s way of bringing up the topic of human rights with me. We touched on popular topics deemed sensitive by the Communist Party, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and last year’s fire in Shanghai. The human costs of these incidents are widely understood as being greatly exacerbated by mismanagement on the part of the Communist Party. Both student A and a friend, student B, expressed their irritation with the “Great Firewall,” or the firewall the Chinese government has erected to separate Chinese internet users from sensitive topics and international social media websites like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. After expressing their annoyance with the firewall’s restrictions, the students assured me that they had capable software to “climb over,” or hack through the Great Firewall.

Student A told me that s/he had come to ask me advice. S/he wanted to use a school project to question human rights issues. “Be careful,” I said. “I’ll talk to you about these issues, but there are a lot of things that I would not suggest saying in public.”

S/he reacted in angst, and began telling me a story.

Early in the freshman orientation, the dean of the International College gave an introduction of the International College to an assembly of all of the college’s students, many of whom had not seen foreigners in person before–as an economic backwater, Guangxi Province does not witness many of the signs of a modern Chinese city. During the speech, the dean directed the student body, “if any of you students have a disagreement with a foreign teacher about a political issue, you students should return to your Chinese teacher to discuss the issue. Do not continue to discuss the political issue with your foreign teacher,” effectively instructing the students to keep their teachers at arm’s-length.

“But now I’ve realized,” student A went on, “that I feel more comfortable discussing politics with you than with my Chinese teachers. You challenge me, and don’t try to control the discussion.”[3]

Several Generations of Chinese Communist Party leadership, from Left, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin instruct the people of Nanning to vigorously work to revitalize the city. Photo by Tim Quijano.

Later, I received an email from student B, one of my smartest and most creative of students, obviously worried for student A’s well-being, and coming to terms with some issues of his/her own. I have edited the text to improve readability; the original is available here (PDF).

I think student A is now really excited about and interested in political and human rights in China. I held similar feelings when I was in middle school. When I was growing up, I discovered many many things that made me really angry.

Today, I still don’t like the government and the party, but I have realized that it shouldn’t disturb my personal life as it did before. It’s just the way it goes. I’m not able to change it. What I should do is avoid doing the same thing in the future. Now many college students here and all over the country apply to be active party members. I know that few of them actually like the party, but being party members will help them get jobs in the government or other public institutions. I will never do that–I have already decided not to work for the government. I just want to be myself. I am sick of saying things that I don’t agree with, and glorifying things that I hate. I don’t want to be so fake as to join the party.

My feelings about the government and party are complex. On the one hand, it really makes my life better. I still remember what my home was like 10 years ago very clearly. We only had a TV and a DVD player. When I compare what my life was like then with what it is now, I have to admit that it’s really a great change. We have really become richer and live a more comfortable better life. On the other hand though, the government has done so many bad things. The party has changed a lot. It’s no longer what it used to be decades before.[4]

These are the realities that must be confronted as these young adults are coming of age in China. Signs of change are visible, sure, but democracy is still inaccessible–too inaccessible for most Chinese youth to bother with caring, particularly outside of Beijing and Shanghai.

[1] The identities of my former students are obscured for their protection.

[2] Han Han (韩寒) is a young man from Shanghai who became well-known while working in the car-racing circuit. Today, however, he is famous for his internet personality, and relative frankness on issues considered sensitive for many to comment on publicly.

The First Cross-Straits History and Culture Summer Research Institute: The Culture of Ba and Shu (第一屆兩岸歷史文化研習營：巴蜀文化), August 18-27, 2011 at Sichuan University, Chengdu

Another UCI graduate student and past China Beat contributor, Chris Heselton, and I recently attended the first ever Cross-Straits History and Culture Summer Institute, co-facilitated by the Sichuan University History Department and the Institute of History and Philology at Taipei’s Academia Sinica, and co-sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo and Song Qingling Foundations. Over 50 Taiwanese and mainland Chinese scholars of the up-and-coming generation attended. By virtue of our relationship with Wang Guo, a Beida student of Luo Zhitian who spent a year studying with Ken Pomeranz at UC Irvine and served as an institute TA, Chris and I were able to attend despite the fact that the original plan did not account for the participation of foreign scholars.

Participants in the Cross-Straits History and Culture Summer Research Institute

My overall impressions from this institute are of awe and hope: awe at the brilliant young scholars who, I think we can all attest, will be at the forefront of China studies in the decades to come as the center of scholarship moves to China itself, and hope that this process will lead to greater scholarly dialogue and openness on all sides.

The institute aimed to achieve two goals: first, to give Taiwanese graduate students the opportunity to visit and personally experience places in China—focusing on Sichuan province in this first meeting—that may figure in their research; second, to incite academic dialogue across the straits. Although these two tasks were fulfilled to differing degrees, the overall institute was a tremendous success. The places we visited included the museums of the Sanxingdui and Jinsha relics of the ancient Shu kingdom, the tomb of the founding king of Shu Wang Jian (王建), the site of the old market village where William Skinner did his first field research, the famed Qin state waterworks Du Jiang Yan, an old Hakka neighborhood of Chengdu dotted with neighborhood associations, Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage, the memorial tomb of Liu Bei (Wuhou Ci), Mt. Emei, Mt. Changshan, and of course a local theater for a Sichuan opera performance. Judging by this list alone, one can easily see that the first goal was more than achieved, and not only the Taiwanese scholars, but also Chinese scholars and we two Americans gained a lot of insight by visiting these long-celebrated sites. Although I’ve been living in Chongqing for about a year now, and have spent lots of time in Chengdu, during this institute I was able to go to places I’d never been before, and “old” places felt new when experienced alongside intelligent and inspiring friends.

The second goal, to spark a cross-straits academic dialogue, is off to a good start but will take a lot more time and mutual effort to achieve. The nine-day institute included eleven different lectures on everything from Babylonian archaeology to Daoist medical exorcism to the ages-old battle between textual exegesis and historical research (經學於史學). The latter topic, subject of the very last lecture, summed up the tensions that institute planners and attendees came across in reaching for this second goal.

People immediately noticed and commented on differences in scholarly approach, application of theory, educational methods and attitudes in classroom discussion between Taiwanese and Chinese scholars. Some comments and behaviors were interpreted as hurtful on both sides, and on the last “free activity” day most students stuck with their own band of friends rather than reach across the cold and frothy straits. Ultimately, I came away with the feeling that Taiwanese and Chinese scholars do not only have a different character script (traditional and simplified), but speak an entirely different scholarly language. Coming from the American academy, Taiwanese analytical and critical scholarship is more familiar and comfortable to me than is the frequently cumulative and cataloging style of much mainland scholarship, but I am loath to call it better for that reason alone. Rather than take sides or stake out a territory in this debate, I wish merely to point out that their grandparents’ political fight and the decades of separate development that it brought have driven a rather large froe between a once unified log, and it will take decades to match up the wood fibers. The first step is for those fibers to long for their old neighbors, and I am not sure if all fibers are on the same page there.

Future such institutes may be held, potentially on a Taiwanese site next time. The irony is that Chiang Ching-kuo’s aunt Song Qingling did not speak to her sister or nephew for decades; would the two be rolling in their graves if they knew how their money was being spent? I would rather hope that the afterlife has given them some wisdom that transcends this dusty world, and that they are smiling at their grandchildren who dare to befriend each other and speak one another’s language.

Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is a PhD candidate in Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine.

I just read Ai Weiwei’s column in Newsweek in which he describes Beijing as a “nightmare” and a “constant nightmare”. I am delighted that his detention ordeal hasn’t dampened his spirits but I have to say that I don’t agree with him at all, though I understand his frustration and bitterness. I have immense respect for Ai, who is an extremely talented artist as well as an extremely courageous man who dares to criticize the authorities. I wish our government were confident enough to tolerate a few eccentrics like Ai, whom I had the pleasure to meet on several occasions. I am sure that Ai, as someone who appreciates the democratic value, wouldn’t mind that others present different views.

I love Beijing. I fell in love with the capital back in 1993 when I first came to live here. I found the city far more exciting and vibrant than my hometown of Nanjing. There’s so much to offer, so many things going on and you always meet interesting people doing interesting things. Ai Weiwei himself is just a fine example.

I am surprised that Ai claims that there’s no favorite place for him in the city. Not even his cool spacey house in the art district of Caochangdi? Usually people carve out their favorite corners even in the bleakest place on earth: you have to make the most out of where you live.

My favorite place is my neighborhood Jiuxianqiaocun – Wine God Bridge Village. Despite its name, it is not a particularly poetic place: it’s rather messy; the narrow streets are littered with rubbish; the low-rise red-brick houses are mostly simply constructed and the public toilets on street corners are smelly. A typical migrant workers’ area. Yet, for me, it is authentic, real and lively. I am renting a house here. There are a lot of activities on the street: people cook, wash their babies and socialize outside (well, their homes are too small). They share food when they cook something good and keep an eye on the neighbour’s children. You have to help each other out when life is harsh. Every day I chat and crack jokes with my neighbours, who always lend me a hand when I drag my heavy electric scooter in and out of my house. Joaquin, a friend stayed with me recently, grew up in Latin America. He described the neighborhood like ‘a slum in Venezuela without the violence or danger’.

For most of the residents, their lives are much better than previous generations. And despite of the fact that the migrant workers are not treated equally as urban dwellers, they can make more money in the city than tilling the land at home. And more importantly, they feel hopeful about the future.

Sure, life is no dinner party for the migrants as they encounter a host of challenges in the city, including their children’s education. The school of my helper’s daughter was closed a few months ago, which caused such stress to her (I blamed it for the few crushed plates), but the girl has been arranged to attend to a local school. Others may not be so lucky.

Beijing as a city has its own problems: its extreme climate, its increasingly congested traffic and of course the polluted air. For Ai, a city is about its mental structure while for me it’s about the people. If you like the people, and can relate to the people, then you naturally feel part of the city as I do. I came from a poor family and slaved for ten years at a factory, I understand the desire of the migrant workers to better their lives.

I am no darling of the government. I had my share of brushes with the authorities: years ago, my ex-husband – a fellow journalist – and I were detained when we went to a small town in Hebei to investigate a case of an innocent man being shot dead by a policeman due to road rage. Before and after that, I was warned that as a Chinese, I shouldn’t write for western media. I have no chance to see my memoir “Socialism is Great!” to be published in China in Chinese because I described the demonstration I organized in support the democratic movement in 1989. When the New York Times reviewed my book in 2008, the page of the review was torn out [of copies of the paper distributed in China]. Same story for Ai – the page of Newsweek where Ai’s article was was also being taken out, according to one report I read.

Speaking of the Olympics, I’d disagree with Ai again: it did bring lots of joy and pride to millions of ordinary Chinese. I was here to witness and report on it.

People find different paths and different roles to play in life. My mission is, in my small way, to help the world to understand where China was coming from and what’s happening now. That’s why I am writing this post.

Lijia Zhang is author of “Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China. This post originally appeared at her personal blog.

An urban designer and cycling enthusiast, Amirah Shahid is currently making her way from Beijing to Shanghai by bike, a trip she estimates will take three weeks and offer on-the-ground insight into how bicycles figure into Chinese life. Interested in bringing Shahid’s project to the attention of China Beat readers, I sent her a few questions and she responded during a break in her journey. Shahid blogs about her Cycle China project here, and you can also follow her progress on Twitter.

MEC: First of all, can you tell China Beat readers a bit about the trip that you’re making right now and what you hope to accomplish through doing it?

AS: I am biking from Beijing to Shanghai over a period of 21 days to explore the role of the bicycle in China. I work at SWA Group-San Francisco as a landscape designer with many new development projects in China. I’m travelling to China with the goal of experiencing the country’s transportation infrastructure first-hand in order to gain knowledge and expertise to help inform our projects. I hope that by travelling through established urban centers, future development sites, and still untouched land I’ll be able to understand the past, present, and future states of the bike in China.

There are many questions I hope to answer by observing and talking with locals: As China continues to grow, how can it accommodate both cars and bikes? What sort of highways, arterials and bike paths are needed to make sure people can efficiently and safely zoom to and from the many, many new buildings rising in this Asian superpower? What sort of infrastructure is needed—and how can it be smartly incorporated into landscape urbanism and landscape design to minimize harmful environmental impacts?

Shahid and her bike, 300 km from Beijing

MEC: What sort of preparations did you make before starting off on this trip? Did you consult with anyone in China about logistics, or did you work everything out on your own?

AS: I found the movie Man Zou—created by a US film maker about moving through China at the slow pace of a bicycle—and contacted him for advice. He put me in touch with their guide, Doven, who has led several tours in China. Unable to ride with me due to scheduling conflicts, he provided valuable route-making advice.

I work with several Chinese natives in my San Francisco office. They were able to provide me with help finding maps, putting me in touch with others, booking hotels, general advice, and moral support for this trip.

Other than the loose guidance I received, I did all the gear research and logistic coordination myself.

MEC: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve encountered on your journey so far? What’s been the most unforgettable (good or bad) moment?

AS: I have been on the road for 5 of 21 days as I write this. The biggest challenge is definitely the language barrier and not being able to ask all the questions I would like. I have prepared translated phrases to get by, a project description, and a survey about the Chinese biking experience…but I always want to ask more and take conversations further than I’m able to.

The most unforgettable moment in the past few days has been able to help a Chinese woman—similar to my age—with a flat tire. I saw her pushing it over a bridge with the tire obviously completely depleted. I rode past her and had my supplies set up by the time she got to me. I gave the international hand wave for stop and she let me get to work. I found the hole, patched it up, and away she went. I didn’t understand a word she said to me and I’m pretty sure she had no idea what I was saying as well—but it didn’t matter.

MEC: You’ve done bike tours in a number of other places (the U.S., Mexico, New Zealand, and Fiji). How does your China trip compare to previous ones? What do you think some of these places could learn from each other when it comes to developing cyclist-friendly infrastructures?

AS: The rapid growth in China is very unique compared to the other countries. I have never seen so many bikes and so many cars sharing the road. I’m surprised by how smoothly people can navigate through the apparent chaos of busy intersections.

Designated bike lanes are gaining popularity in the US and a lot of work surrounds making sure they are clear to both cyclists and pedestrians to ensure the safety of both groups. The laws are very clear about the cyclists’ rights to certain parts of the road and are enforced (I know people who have gotten tickets for biking through stop signs). The US also has bike advocacy groups in big urban areas that play a critical role in pushing policy and raising awareness about urban cycling issues

The amazing landscape of New Zealand is what attracts most cyclists. It shifts from sand dunes, to rural sheep fields, to snowcapped mountains, to glaciers, to geothermic eruptions from the ground. The Chinese rural landscape in the section I’m riding (the forests, mountains, ocean views, stretching rivers, throughout the rest of the country) are also very special and can attract many tourists and locals if enough of a corridor is left un-fragmented despite all of the new construction and development of new urban areas.

The biggest attraction on the Mexico tour I did was the large number of cultural ruins scattered along my route. China is very rich in culture and historical remains. A designated cultural loop connecting many of these sites to each other could increase bike traffic and touring in these regions.

By sheer chance I came across the August 1964 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies (23.4), which features a “Symposium on Chinese Studies and the Disciplines.” Reading those essays, I felt a shock of recognition. They raise the question of what has changed in the field and what has not changed in nearly 50 years. The symposium was based on a panel from the 1964 Association of Asian Studies annual meeting. AAS members can read all the back issues of JAS for themselves, but here are a few comments from one jaundiced perspective.

The symposium consists of articles by Joseph R. Levenson, Mary C. Wright, G. William Skinner, Maurice Freedman, and Frederick W. Mote, with a note from Benjamin Schwartz—all of whom had written, or were writing, monographs that even today are not past their due date (Ed. note: see the end of this essay for more on each of the above figures and their major publications). I would like to return to a few of their concerns.

Wright’s essay began, “I think the study of China requires the study of its history,” and “I think the proper practice of the historical profession in general requires some awareness of the history of China.” To my ears at least, this sounds so bleeding obvious that the only question is what kind of world made it necessary to say it out loud. True, today we are in an era when “history” is disappearing from at least American secondary schools, and university history departments are being downsized (along with the rest of the humanities), but historical literacy is probably as high as it has ever been. And although “the West is best” school is thoroughly entrenched in academia, I doubt there is any way back from the continued incorporation of China into historical thinking and the new world history. Wright was attacking two enemies, both of which have largely disappeared: the Hegelian historian (my term) who simply did not believe that China (and India and so forth) possessed history; and the Sinologist, who did not believe historical methodologies had anything of interest to say about China. Those masters of timeless textual studies who so annoyed Wright are today nearly invisible. I will come back to “Sinology.”

For his part, Levenson began with an attack on “Sinology” defined as “control of texts”—which is a “wonderful means but a weak end.” Again, from today’s point of view, it seems entirely reasonable for Levenson to proclaim that we need to be in control: we come to the texts with our questions, we don’t let the texts tell us what our intellectual problems are. There does seem to be an odor of mid-century masculinity in this way of posing the issue (as in Freedman’s insistence that anthropological initiation-by-fieldwork turns the adolescent into a man). Be that as it may, today we take for granted who gets to ask the questions. That does not solve the epistemological issues of where our questions come from, and how we treat the data in order to answer them, etc., etc. (questions that Levenson was certainly aware of), but reflects a certain confidence largely maintained even in today’s world of intellectual crisis and uncertainty.

The symposium-writers were polite to their Sinological ancestors. Levenson suggested that Sinology had been a corrective to “free-floating literary chinoiserie” of a previous age, but was now outdated by the professionalization of the “Chinese field.” The real problem for Levenson seems to have been that Sinology represented a grand ghetto-ization of a pseudo-field that was thereby kept away from the real fields where the action was: the disciplines of art, philosophy, literature, history, and so on. How can we explain the irony that more than almost any scholar today, Levenson was as comfortable talking about the grand swathes of Chinese art and philosophy and literature as his own field of modern history? In debunking Sinology, Levenson did not want to deny China’s unique qualities but to claim that “China belongs now in a universal world of discourse.” Levenson’s was a warning that China should not be—and could not be—objectified any longer.

In response (I take it), Mote attempted a defense of Sinology. He did so by changing the definition somewhat. “Sinology means the study of Chinese civilization as a coherent whole.” Obviously one cannot know everything, but the scholarly “ideal” should be to remain always aware of the “larger whole.” Mote’s target here was the kind of academic disciplinization that led to fragmentation. We know something about that today as well.

It may seem that as long as everybody is allowed like Humpty Dumpty to define words as they see fit, all we get are unobjectionable slogans. Who does not want to keep the whole in mind, to the degree possible? And who does not want historians or sociologists of China to be able to speak professionally with their disciplinary counterparts? Whether China belongs to a universal world of discourse may seem tricky if we reject the premise that there is any such thing, but I know very few scholars today who do not act as if they accept the premise.

The point is not that these makers of modern China studies were uttering truisms but that they were responding to what they saw as the threats of the day. One of these was gatekeepers of the Altar of History, today long vanquished. But the specters of Sinology, not least via the later movement of “area studies,” are still with us today. Perhaps they are built in to the very structure of “our” (Westerners’) need to learn about “them” (Chinese). On the one hand, surely Levenson and Wright could claim victory in the academic war against Sinology-as-textual-studies. On the other, Mote’s call for an “integral” approach to China—later phrased as multi-disciplinary scholarship and perhaps, even later, in cultural studies when it deals with China—can hardly be ignored.

Schwartz’s warning against “The Fetish of the ‘Disciplines’” was in this spirit. Something in the “New Sinology” also seems in this spirit—see Geremie R. Barmé, “On New Sinology,” first published in the Chinese Studies Association of Australia Newsletter no. 3 (May 2005). Barmé emphasizes engagement with contemporary China—indeed, the whole Sinophone world—which is precisely where traditional Sinology was generally seen as missing in action. But he also emphasizes the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach to a range of texts (and images), premodern as well as contemporary. In my reading, Barmé is trying to counter the ‘presentism’ of so much academic, journalistic, and popular work on China. He remarks that “those who are unlettered in the basic histories, languages and ideas of the last few centuries will be only ever semi-literate in the culture, thought and even language of China today.”

Presentism in this sense (it seems to me) includes the imperialistic claims of the social sciences to perfect knowledge based on one flavor or another of rational choice and decision theory. As Mary Wright suggested so long ago, the China studies field should welcome illiterate social scientists (illiterate in Chinese) to use our data. Some of them will even, as Mote graciously allowed, become Sinologists. Neither Wright nor Mote could foresee the day when serious analysis would ignore historical culture altogether.

Nor did the social scientists writing in the 1964 symposium foresee the day of their triumph. In their twinned pieces “What the Study of China Can Do for Social Science” and “What Social Science Can Do for Chinese Studies,” Skinner and Freedman, like the pioneers they were, foresaw the day when a significant number of social scientists would study China and change both their disciplines and Chinese studies. Without knowledge of China, the social sciences could hardly claim to be universal, Skinner pointed out. This point is today widely accepted, at least among my small circle of friends. Freedman was a little more challenging: he not only stated that the contribution social sciences might make to Sinology lay in the social scientists’ ability to make explicit comparisons, produce systematic generalizations, and make new models of social reality, but he also warned that the social sciences had their own agendas (my word).

Wright foresaw an interaction of historical work and social science analysis that I think in many ways was born out by the great strides made in the social history of China in the late twentieth century. I do not know if Chinese studies have changed the social sciences in anything like the way the social sciences changed the writing of history in the field. Obviously we live in a very different scholarly world than 1964, when area studies was but a toddler. But we can still ask, does an economist studying the Chinese banking system need to know Tang poetry? The (new) Sinologist may say, yes. But does a Tang historian need to keep up with the latest social networking system in the Sinophone world? The (old) Sinologist may have denied it, but it seems doubtful that scholarship divorced from present-day concerns will mean much.

I do not know if the early Sixties should be seen as a particular moment of self-reflection and a new phase of professionalization. If so, it might be compared to the critique of the field that emerged out of the New Left movement circa 1970 (spearheaded by the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars) and the critique of the postcolonial school in the early 1990s (spearheaded by positions). The 1964 essays in JAS seem politically naïve after all the extra-academic and intra-academic wars of more recent generations, but their professional concerns seem quite fresh. For all that has changed, the battles between the social sciences and the more humanistic disciplines seem never to have ceased, and the tension between disciplinary specialization and general understanding (cultural and linguistic immersion to the extent possible) is probably unresolvable. Of course, all this navel-gazing tells us more about the West than China, though with luck it better equips Westerners to understand China—and perhaps has helped the most recent generation of Western scholars to interact and work with Chinese scholars around the world. In China itself recent years have seen a revival (if that is the right word) of “national studies” (国学 guoxue), a culturalist approach to texts not entirely unlike Sinology. It is too soon to say whether “national studies” will degenerate into nationalist essentialism or produce stimulating cross-disciplinary work. One day it might contribute to the dream of universal social science. Who knows?

Dramatis Personae & Selected Bibliography

Joseph R. Levenson (1920-1969), taught at the University of California-Berkeley: Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China, 1953; Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy, 1958-1965; and (with Franz Schurmann) China: An Interpretive History, from the Beginnings to the Fall of Han, 1969.

Mary C. Wright (1917-1970), taught at Yale University: The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-chih Restoration, 1862-1874, 1957; and (ed.) China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913, 1968.

G. William Skinner (1925-2008), taught at Cornell and Stanford Universities: Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand, 1958; Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China, 1965; and (co-ed.) The Chinese City between Two Worlds, 1974, and The City in Late Imperial China, 1977.

Maurice Freedman (1920-1975), taught at the London School of Economics: Chinese Family and Marriage in Singapore, 1957; Lineage Organization in Southeastern China, 1958; Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung, 1966; and (collected essays) The Study of Chinese Society, 1979.

Benjamin I. Schwartz (1916-1999), taught at Harvard University: Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, 1951; In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West, 1964; and The World of Thought in Ancient China, 1985.

Peter Zarrow is a historian at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His work focuses on modern China and he is the author of China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (Routledge, 2005).